Hi, after following this list for a couple of weeks I have gotten nowhere trying to acheive decent acceleration for my ATI Radeon QL (8500 128mb), and it doesn't seem many others have, either. This is Status Quo:
* The resident XF86 'ati' driver works, gives a display etc (I have a perfectly working dual-head setup, if anyone is interested: a note about this in the postscript), but I have yet to acheive anything but software 3d and choppy window movement. Even xscreensaver runs super-slow! What gives? I did have trouble loading glx earlier, but I traced this problem to my enabling of the radeon framebuffer device in the kernel. Now glx loads, but performance is still crap. * Video/dvd playback with mplayer and xine is good, but only with the rootmode direct-to-card vidix extention. Xv modes load, but give nothing, sometimes distorted greens, sometimes a blue band, sometimes a very thin sliver of the playing video is visible in the window. * ATI has released it's FireGl200 workstation drivers for the radeon, as these apparently have the same chipset. In fact, when getting drivers for linux from the ati support site, for any radeon (including, specifically, my QL) you will be directed to these firegl drivers. They come only as rpms. I have seen reports of people with different radeon cards (ve etc) getting these drivers to work, and being content. Not I. When I try to load these drivers I get a "card unsupported". I should be complaining to ATI, except linux, and the firegl driver for the radon, is unsupported. * The GATOS project and their ati.2 driver: I have for some reason not gotten anywhere with this driver. If I install it, X just plain refuses to load. No log, no nothing except a 'signal 11', and an occational curruption of my XF86Config-4, if I'm running as root. I recently posted to the gatos-devel forum, and it's too early to expect a reply. * Hard resets: Over the past weeks I've installed the XF86 4.2.0 binaries, updated to 4.2.1, used woody deb packages (4.1.x), installed gatos drivers etc etc and I am no longer sure what cominations of which results in the computer _hard resetting_ when I start x |not in root|. This has usually happened after either updating to 4.2.1 or using gatos ati.2. I will try to experiment further, although I don't like it at all- my harddrive filesystems don't like it at all. Debian sid just updated their packages to 4.2.1-1 and things seem to be working. * The framebuffer and Xfb => I don't know where to start with this one, or whether it will help me at all. My past experience with framebuffer drivers (which is to say all I have done is compile them into the kernel to get the penguin at startup), both with nvidia and ati cards indicates they do not mix with anything else. If anyone could point me in the right direction, or tell me what, if anything, I can expect to acheive with fbdev. Help, comments, links, drivers, puns and crackpot ideas will be greatly appreciated -Kacper Wysocki PS: I have seen a number of people post to the forum concerning problems setting up the dual-output radeon for dual-headedness. I did post replies to those I felt I could help- I invite those I missed to repost, and I'll see what I can do. _______________________________________________ Xpert mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://XFree86.Org/mailman/listinfo/xpert
